A stunning Barbican debut by Les Siècles

Les Siècles, initially comprising young players from major French ensembles, play on instruments from the period of the music they perform – they can access a large period-instrument collection from the Baroque to early modern eras. This group is now 20 years old, and enjoying a celebratory tour with François-Xavier Roth, its founder and conductor. Roth is also Principal Guest Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, and said how special it was for him to bring Les Siècles to its debut performance at the Barbican.

Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune is a Roth calling card, and he has more than once used it to open Barbican concerts, making the LSO sound French with his incomparable feeling for the work’s colours, shifting moods and emotional ambiguity. This work of the early 1890s is cited as announcing modern music, and with Schubert’s orchestra (well, we are in France so add a harp, and antique cymbals at the close). The same idiomatic interpretation from Roth benefited from the purest of solos from Principal Flute Marion Ralincourt, and from the band’s trademark transparency of sound.

When Weber’s Der Freischütz was staged at the Paris Opéra in 1841, Berlioz provided the customary ballet by orchestrating a Weber piano piece, his Invitation to the Dance. Its high-stepping rhythms, choreographed by Roth bouncing on his toes in familiar fashion, made a lively contrast to the slower items that framed it. But now it was time to collect some valved horns and other instruments from about 1900 for some 20th-century music.

D’un soir triste was written by Lili Boulanger in 1918, shortly before she died, aged 24. Her sister Nadia put the piece away until shortly before her own death in 1979, and one can hear why. We have all known “sad evenings” but few like this, despairing and inconsolable. Its eleven-minute, three beat trudge is funereal, its climax ferociously dissonant, and Roth pulled no punches. At the end, strings (sans vibrato) and harp offer some major key consolation, but too brief to be more than a glimpse of what-might-have-been for the world of 1918. Apart from some fine songs I have been a sceptic about Boulanger’s stature. Roth and his players clearly believe in her, and she can rarely have had such persuasive advocacy as this performance.

Serge Diaghilev, according to the programme note, told Ravel his Daphnis et Chloé was not a ballet but “a painting of a ballet”. That observation was actually made about Ravel’s La Valse, but applies better to a work the composer called a symphonie choréographique with its taut structure and motivic integration. Roth and his – for this score very numerous – players, excelled in this magnificent score. Again the (now expanded) flute section stood out, Ralincourt’s long and tricky solo in Part 3 as eloquent as one can ever hope to hear it. The complexity of many passages was well served by Les Siècles’ lucidity, radiant in the Lever du jour, and thrilling in the closing Danse générale.

The extensive use of a wordless chorus is an extraordinary element in the sensuous texture of Daphnis, which did not stop Diaghilev often staging it without a chorus to save money. How the impresario must have envied the British amateur choral tradition, and the high standards exemplified by the London Symphony Chorus. They provided a superb send-off to their departing Director, Simon Halsey, who had clearly prepared them with his usual dedication.